Maximum Shelf: America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien

Posted on August 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on July 27, 2023.

Set against the backdrop of an unnamed but recognizable American presidency, Tim O’Brien’s black comedy, America Fantastica, takes both the dark and the comic to epic proportions with simultaneous absurdism and poignancy. O’Brien (The Things They Carried; If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home) here offers his first novel in more than 20 years–a sprawling, madcap tale of road trips, crimes large and small, love, loss, and, most of all, lying. Like The Things They Carried, America Fantastica revels in detail and highly specific lists, so that the world it portrays feels robust and brimming.

Its opening lines set the tone, far-reaching and grandiose: “The contagion was as old as Africa, older than Babylon, wafting from century to century upon sunlight and moonbeams and the vibrations of wagging tongues. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the contagion alighted in Fulda, California, riding aboard the bytes of a MacBook Air…. Reinvigorated by repeated utterance, fertilized by outrage, mythomania claimed its earliest victims among chat room patrons–the disappointed, the defeated, the disrespected, and the genetically suspicious…. The disease spread northward into Oregon, eastward into Idaho, arriving on Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 2017.”

Readers first meet O’Brien’s antihero in action. “On an afternoon in late August of the year 2019, after locking up the JCPenney store on South Spruce Street, Boyd Halverson strode out to his car, started the engine, sat without moving for several minutes, then blinked and wiped his eyes and resolved to make changes in his life. He had grown sick and tired of synthetics, rayon in particular.” He departs his Kiwanis brunch early to head to the bank, where he presents a gun and leaves with just under $81,000 and the teller, “a diminutive redhead named Angie Bing.” She is technically kidnapped, but Boyd will repeatedly try and fail to ditch her over the coming months. His name is not really Boyd Halverson and his entire résumé is a fiction. He had in fact been married, had a child, had an impressive career as a foreign correspondent and nearly won a Pulitzer Prize. But that life was built on lies, culminating when “at last he collided with the sudden, brutal, and well-earned catastrophe he’d been patiently anticipating for decades.”

Boyd and Angie hit the road, seeking first Boyd’s ex-wife, Evelyn, and then her father, Dooney, against whom Boyd holds a significant grudge. Their travels prompt movements by an increasingly colorful cast of bizarre characters. Dooney and his partner Calvin flee the possibly murderous Boyd from Port Aransas, Tex., to Bemidji, Minn., and onward. Randy, Angie’s boyfriend, an almost-laughably amoral electrician/rodeo cowboy/burglar, tracks Angie from Santa Rosalía, Mexico, to Santa Monica, Calif., and beyond. Along the way, he meets two ex-cons at a diner in Los Angeles who latch onto his interest in an unreported bank robbery. These characters set the tone of a novel dealing equally in ludicrous comedy, political commentary, and pathos. They will be joined in O’Brien’s imaginative, wide-ranging tale by a violent, egomaniacal CFO; a bank president and his wife, both with a gift and passion for fraud; a racist cop; an Amazonian CrossFit gym owner and amateur detective; a small-town sex worker with either an excellent act or multiple personalities. Events range from disturbing to ridiculous, often simultaneously, as when Boyd gets his toes broken with a monkey wrench by an unlikely pair of sidekicks. These characters and events, in a series of deftly drawn American locales, form a fantasmagoria, a version of reality that both bizarrely exaggerates and digs directly into the emotional truth of the real world.

O’Brien opens with a Yeats epigraph: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” His novel speaks of a nation that craves delusion and deception; O’Brien’s profile of the 2019 United States is savage, blending satire and realism. “Off with their heads! Climatologists? Chemists? Off with their tongues! Who needs reality when you have Venom? Who needs history when you can manufacture your own?” Is it plausible that Boyd, an esteemed investigative journalist, exposed as a liar, might in turn expose larger wrongs than his own?

America Fantastica showcases a broad emotional range, as Boyd Halverson (aka Otis Birdsong, aka Junior, et al.) turns out to harbor some very real trauma amid a fabricated personal history, and at least one complex personal relationship. It is a story chock-full of lies or fictions, a theme O’Brien has explored in earlier works as well. “[Boyd] had fervently believed every word, every unearned moment of an unlived life. Yes, he was a Princeton graduate. Yes, he had distinguished himself in the Hindu Kush, scaled Mount McKinley, survived brain cancer, scored near-perfect on his SATs. But so what? Why risk failure when a fib was always conveniently at hand?” By the novel’s end, readers will have learned–more or less, as far as we can tell–the “real” truth. This feels in some respects like a hopeful conclusion. But the truth itself is more grim than hopeful, which is perhaps the most realistic–truthful–possibility.

As in the earlier works for which he has long been recognized, O’Brien here demonstrates an electric combination of deadpan humor, vicious wit, and a masterful eye for detail in capturing a peculiarly American form of torment.

Rating: 7 wiggles.

Come back Monday for my interview with O’Brien.

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Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

Posted on August 7, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this darkly comedic yet philosophical horror novel, an unhappy 20-something returns home to the insular community and church she’d left behind only to find frights worse than she’d remembered.

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison (Such Sharp Teeth; Cackle; The Return) moves inexorably from the darkly absurd into terrifying horror. Readers follow apathetic, antisocial Vesper Wright as she returns home to her estranged family and learns that what she knew of her unorthodox upbringing was just the beginning.

Vesper is 23 years old, working as a server at a chain restaurant “in an unglamorous part of Westchester County, sporting a polo and serving plates of baby back ribs I was fairly certain were generated in a lab.” She’s unhappy but relieved to be free from the family, community, and church in which she was raised–until she receives an invitation to attend the wedding of her former best friend and her first boyfriend. Magnetically drawn to the place she misses, dreads, and still thinks of as home, Vesper reencounters not only the unusual church but her powerful mother, a horror movie megastar who never proved very maternal: “I’d only ever seen her emote on screen, her vulnerability behind glass. She was more human to me when she was pretending to be someone other than herself.” What she finds at home will blow Vesper’s world, and perhaps literally the entire world, wide open. She reconsiders her memories and “that our past is not the truth. It’s warped by time and emotion, inevitably muddied by love and resentment, joy and shame, hope and regret.” Eventually Vesper will have to rethink everything she thought she understood about her family, her church, and her past–and reexamine her loss of faith.

Early on, Black Sheep exhibits black humor and an accessible 20-something nihilistic angst. Details of Vesper’s former church are darkly comic. As the stakes rise, however, Harrison’s imaginative plot turns gruesomely to true horror. Fans of the genre will find pleasure in both the playful and the ghastly aspects. Aside from the terror, Vesper’s story ruminates on themes that include nature vs. nurture, the legacy of family trauma, and the repercussions of organized religion in its various forms. “Nothing terrified me more than this. The notion that without a choice we inherit parts of us that we cannot change. Cannot cut out.” This subject matter elevates a horror novel to a study in philosophy, even as the bloodletting ramps up.

Black Sheep is can’t-look-away riveting in its best and most disturbing moments, gripping readers on both conceptual and visceral levels. Vesper’s discontent and wrestling with her own worst self, her former family’s creepy cultlike demeanor, and the final crescendo of action add up to an unforgettable adventure.

This review originally ran in the July 14, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 glasses of wine.

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Dragon Spear by Jessica Day George

Posted on August 4, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Dragon Spear is the final volume in the Dragon Slippers trilogy, and I remain glad I was handed that first book by a young friend. These have been entirely fun, with positive messaging and enough grit and humor to keep me engaged. The dragon characters are as sweet and diverse as the human ones, and the women and girls, and female dragons, tend to be both clever and strong. It’s very appealing material for this age group, and I found it perfect, easy reading while on a recent trip to see family.

In this episode, once again, we think the dragons are safe until they aren’t. This time something’s different: the threat comes from other dragons, under their own power and not that of malicious humans. In fact, these dragons enslave humans. And there are some young ones at stake–as well as Creel’s wedding dress, as her union with the younger prince approaches. We lose track of Marta, which is a shame, but get a new human buddy: Creel’s brother Hagen has shown up. He’s an interesting new feature. Dragon friends, and the prince Luka, remain steadfast.

It seems like faint praise to say that this one offers nothing especially new. But I truly feel comforted by knowing what to expect, especially at this reading level. This one is faithful to the series in pleasing ways.

A final strong recommendation. And I’m a little bit considering looking into George’s other works.

Rating: 7 holes.

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The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey

Posted on July 31, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The sun smiled violently overhead, causing the tar beneath Rue’s blue-striped Adidas to glisten and pulse.

The first in a new series from a prolific author of 20-something previous works, The Taken Ones offers mysteries within mysteries.

On a hot July day in 1980 three little girls walked into the woods in small-town Leech Lake, Minnesota. They were headed for a dip in the creek, but never made it. Instead, one girl, Rue, walked back out again, with no memory of what had traumatized her nearly to death. Her friend Amber (eight) and Rue’s little sister Lily (five) were gone.

More than forty years later, Agent Van Reed of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension strives to escape her own traumas. Forgetting is the best thing, she tells herself. Her childhood and teen years were newspaper-headline material, and she’d dedicated ten years of her life to the Minneapolis Police Department, only to be ostracized after the death of her beloved partner. When a woman is discovered dead after being buried alive, and Van is called in on the case, she pursues it avidly, partnered with the unbelievably dapper forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck. She wonders if this new partnership might represent a fresh start. As the recent victim is tied to the decades-old disappearance, though, Van may find wounds reopened and secrets bared that she can’t stomach.

Van’s trauma (and that of the surviving girl, Rue, now a profoundly troubled psych nurse) reads true, and while her story is a bit sensational (again, headline material), that stuff does happen in real life. (Being a law enforcement agent with that past is an absolutely believable plot element, and imagine how hard.) She’s not entirely well – nor would she be. Harry Steinbeck is loveable and mysterious, and definitely hiding something. Side characters who incline toward ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys have their own complicating features, too. I loved many of the sentences and descriptions, and Lourey’s eye for place.

This is a plot with many twists and side paths as dark as those Minnesota woods. Lourey excels at short chapters and cliffhangers, keeping me up past my bedtime for a few nights in a row. This is an exciting one, abounding in surprise reveals, most of them unexpected even to this trope-sensitive, genre-attuned reader. There were also some intriguing threads begun that I hope will be followed in later books in the series. This is expert work. I’m really looking forward to more Steinbeck & Reed.

Rating: 8 glasses of sweet tea.

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Girls with a Voice and Girls with Courage by Ann Turnbull and Adèle Geras

Posted on July 28, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Another loan from my favorite 11-year-old, this is a pair of historical novels linked by location. Girls with a Voice, by Ann Turnbull, is about a 12-year-old girl named Mary Ann who travels from London to a boarding school in the nearby village of Chelsea in 1764. She is excited to study singing and the harpsichord there, because she wants to perform as an opera singer onstage (an ambition her family is not especially supportive of). She makes good friends, not only with her fellow pupils, but with a maid in the large house where the school is located. The maid, Jenny, also has a fine singing voice, but because of her class, cannot have the same training as Mary Ann. Jenny sings ballads in the streets for money, however, which Mary Ann finds extraordinary. When circumstances change for Mary Ann’s family, she has to get creative in problem-solving to continue following her dream.

In Girls with Courage, set in 1857, Adèle Geras tells us about Lizzie, also 12, who is on a journey from her home in the country into London, to stay with family in their large, impressive home on Chelsea Walk. This is the same home that housed Mary Ann’s boarding school nearly 100 years earlier; what was then an outlying village is now part of the city, and Lizzie, a country mouse, is awed by the bustle. Lizzie’s father died when she was young, and her beloved mother Cecily is now remarried to a dour man who has suggested Lizzie go away for a spell, as Cecily is pregnant. Lizzie will stay with her father’s brother’s family: uncle, aunt, three cousins including a boy her own age, another uncle who has been injured in the Crimean War, and a grandmother, as well as several servants. Compared to her spare country upbringing, this life strikes Lizzie as grand and luxurious, although also limiting: she enjoyed learning about plants and trees from a local orchardist, and now is forced to do needlework that she finds very tedious. Cut off from her late father’s books by the mean stepfather, she now yearns to learn the math and science that her cousin Hugh gets to study. She misses her mother terribly–and when something seems to have gone amiss back home, Lizzie will have to be brave to help.

As you can tell from these summaries, both stories are a bit sweet and instructive. While I like these protagonists, they are earnest and simple and good-hearted in a way that leaves off the grit and snark and fun I like in all my reading, children’s and young adult of course included. Compared to the Dragon Slippers trilogy this same young friend introduced me to, Girls is less delightful. That said, I passed a pleasant enough day-and-a-half here, and have no argument with the messaging about girls following their passions – whether in music or botany – and standing up for themselves (and their mothers). This messaging is not exactly radical, but still solid. And I’m glad my young friend is interested in history. I look forward to hearing what she loved about the book, and will continue reading anything she brings me.

Rating: 6 walnuts.

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Return of the Bison: A Story of Survival, Restoration, and a Wilder World by Roger Di Silvestro

Posted on July 24, 2023 by pagesofjulia

With fervor and meticulous research–and with implications for the future of megafauna around the world–Roger L. Di Silvestro recounts the complex and difficult ongoing struggle for bison recovery.

With Return of the Bison: A Story of Survival, Restoration, and a Wilder World, naturalist Roger L. Di Silvestro (Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands) chronicles the history of an iconic species. This exhaustively researched text briefly describes the bison’s early massive proliferation across the North American continent, humans’ heavy pursuit of them, and their near extinction as a result. But it begins in earnest with the earliest conservation efforts, in the 1880s, through the present. Di Silvestro outlines the stories of the American wood bison (western Canada and Alaska) and the European bison, or wisent, but his focus rests chiefly on the American plains bison, which until the late 1800s covered much of North America in the kinds of extraordinary numbers also associated with the now-extinct passenger pigeon. While the bison population has recovered from just a few hundred into the low hundreds of thousands (most of those in commercial herds), its fate is far from secure; in fact, according to some biologists, the bison is already ecologically extinct (“its numbers are so low, so scattered, that it no longer fulfills any ecological role”). The lessons of this story apply to the conservation of other megafauna worldwide, including giraffes, elephants, rhinos, and wildebeest.

Di Silvestro writes with passion about the loss to biodiversity and ecosystems represented by the near-death of a keystone species, as well as the damage to Native American cultures, which have historically been closely tied to the bison’s massive herds. He also considers wild human characters, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Lacey, George Bird Grinnell, William T. Hornaday, and Charles Goodnight. The bison’s tale is poignant, infuriating, inspiring, and hopeful–and perhaps, above all, complicated, involving intricacies of both human and natural histories. At just over 200 pages, Return of the Bison feels longer, dense as it is with detail, such as the bison’s fluctuating population numbers on various tracts of land, the perils of genetic diversity in small herds, human intolerance, cultural clashes, and evolving concepts of and trends in wildlife conservation. This is not only a narrative of the bison; Di Silvestro is concerned with the story of “the first large mammal subjected to recovery efforts” and what lessons this unprecedented battle has for other similar attempts.

Return of the Bison is a thorough, impassioned, expert account of a specific conservation effort over the past 150 years and the questions that will continue to face those who care about wildlife and human impact on the natural world. “The saga of the bison is still an unfurling epic”–and one to watch.

This review originally ran in the June 30, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 humps.

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Under the Influence by Noelle Crooks

Posted on July 21, 2023 by pagesofjulia

An aspiring writer goes to work for charismatic self-help guru in a propulsively paced, Stepford-like tale of workplace violations and the search for self-actualization.

Under the Influence, Noelle Crooks’s first novel, follows a young woman into a work opportunity that offers the chance for great success–or a total loss of self.

A few years ago, Harper Cruz moved from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to the big city to make her way as a writer, and then slid into what she thought was a safer position working in publishing. Now, laid off, she’s been struggling to make rent, aided by a perfectly lovely best friend, Poppy. It’s Poppy who finds the listing for a “Visionary Support Strategist” to a social media sensation, influencer Charlotte Green. As soon as she’s applied, Harper finds herself whisked off to Nashville, Tenn., rushed through signing a contract for an unbelievable amount of money, and inducted into the work family at the Greenhouse, where tiny, magnetic, manipulative Charlotte rules a team of employees who are both in love with and terrified of her.

Harper is bookish; she couldn’t have named a single influencer before she worked for one; and her own Insta, according to a #GreenTeam colleague, is “sad.” She has off-and-on concerns about Charlotte’s self-help empire; her boss notes more than once how much integrity Harper has. But she falls under the spell of Charlotte’s charm and carefully meted compliments and soon embraces the long hours, absence of work-life balance, and cult-like branding that defines the Greenhouse. Mandatory dance parties, social media oversharing, and bottomless green juice should compensate for a few HR violations, right? Harper has a new best friend and possibly even a romantic interest, both at work. She sees herself losing touch with Poppy and her own parents, but Charlotte needs her–even at night, over the weekends, and on holidays. Charlotte warns her staff, of course, that their families won’t support their work: “Powerful people can be intimidating.” If Harper starts seeing her relationships break down, she figures, “I guess that’s just the price of success.”

Under the Influence is propulsive in its pacing, with the chipper tones of the Green Team and the emotional roller coaster that is Harper’s work (and only) life. That readers can see warning signs that Harper herself often fails to note makes the novel quietly terrifying, even in the upbeat spin so carefully crafted by Charlotte’s helpers. The result is disorienting, even mind-bending: Harper’s story is green-clad, photogenic, cheerful, and horrifying. Secondary characters at the Greenhouse are finely drawn and nuanced. After wrestling with workplace culture, female friendships, and the risks inherent in coming of age, Crooks’s debut ends on a hopeful note, blending horror into fantasy. Compulsively readable, frightening but addictive, Under the Influence perfectly captures some of the contradictions and challenges of modern work life.

This review originally ran in the June 12, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 5 red flags.

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Dragon Flight by Jessica Day George

Posted on July 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Book two in the trilogy that began with Dragon Slippers is at least as good – my young friend who recommended them to me prefers the first book but I think this one might be better. Creel, in her late teens, is now an entrepreneur, running a dress shop in King’s Seat along with her best (human) friend and business partner, Marta. Marta is engaged to marry Tobin, former bodyguard to the younger prince, Luka; Creel is less secure in her relationship, but the reader can see that Luka himself is smitten with her, commoner or no. Because this is the Dragon Slipper series, trouble quickly arises: a distant country is poised to invade with an army of soldiers riding dragons. We know that dragons are not hostile by nature, so something funny (probably of the alchemical variety, as in book one) must be afoot.

One thing I love about Creel is her genuine devotion to her dragon friends. Her first friend, really, was a dragon, while she definitely has some good human ones. She is adamant in her defense of the misunderstood dragons, anxious both to protect their reputations and keep them safe. The humans also need dragons to keep them safe, and Creel is the liaison between the two groups.

I love the friendships among and between humans and dragons. I love Creel’s (and Marta’s) innovations and puzzling through problems, and their bravery. The romances are sweet, but what I love most about the pairings is that Creel and Marta are outright heroes while their respective beaus just follow along, supportive but a little bumbling, good-natured about their partners’ impressive accomplishments. (I considered sharing this observation with the 11-year-old who recommended these books to me, then realized I’d actually rather she live in a world where this was unremarkable.)

Charming, daring, whimsical, loveable, endearing. I’m in for book three.

Rating: 7 scales.

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Walk the Darkness Down by Daniel Magariel

Posted on July 14, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Grim but with a final upward turn, this novel of loss, grief, and strained bonds investigates human connections and disconnections.

In Walk the Darkness Down, Daniel Magariel (One of the Boys) introduces a couple separately torturing themselves through grief and eventually coming together again.

Marlene and Les, who live in a small, troubled town on the Atlantic coast of the United States, lost their young daughter years ago. In suffering, they mistreat each other. Les is a commercial fisherman on an offshore scalloping boat with a crew of other men; punishingly hard physical labor, camaraderie, and violence combine in a cocktail that helps distract him from his loss. Marlene drives the streets at night, mining memory, searching for the deep and searing pain that will help her remember. During his brief stays at their apartment, they repeat a pattern: Marlene breaks the bedroom door and Les fixes it. When Les is offshore, she picks up local sex workers and brings them home to clean them up and feed them. One of these encounters develops into something resembling friendship, just as Les’s crew fractures and the dangers of his work increase. Marlene clips newspaper articles about freak natural occurrences: mass deaths of red-winged blackbirds and horseshoe crabs; new migrations of American bullfrogs; wildfires, droughts, and the widening of tornado alley. As their two lives approach new crises, Marlene and Les must chart a course out of self-destruction.

Magariel’s prose is as quietly lovely and evocative as his subjects are bleak. “The woman settles into her chair, and Marlene proceeds to lay bare the details of her face. The worry lines of her forehead Marlene excavates with a pass over the brow.” His settings showcase realistic detail, and both beauty and damage: fecund coastlines and wetlands, the harsh sea, an old family home, and garishly decorated working-class bars. Marlene and Les treat one another with alternating callousness and tenderness; Les’s relationships, especially on the boat (with what Marlene calls his “other family”), reveal a memorable form of rough, ungentle love.

Relationships across great distances–physical and psychic–are a central concern of this novel, which is focused on how its characters handle pain. “You got to abide with your darkness as if it were a scared child that wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to be walked back down to bed,” Marlene’s newest acquaintance asserts, but each character wrestles with hurt in their own, often-wounding ways.

Stark and tragic, Walk the Darkness Down offers a harrowing view of individual and familial suffering–with empathy and, ultimately, with hope.

This review originally ran in the June 6, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 lobsters.

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Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Posted on July 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This is a very cute, sweet, pleasurable story: a cozy mystery, a loving family tale, with rom-com style matchups and a loveable amateur sleuth. Vera Wong is an older lady – in the world of this novel, she’s just sixty but also an ‘old lady,’ all things being relative, I guess. (Despite Vera’s starring role, the rest of the perspectives are decidedly youthful.) She’s widowed, and she misses her beloved husband, but it is in her personality (and, implied, part of her ‘Chinese mother’ culture) to soldier on. She has a small business she’s very proud of: Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Yes, she’s taking advantage of the more famous Vera Wang’s name recognition.) She lives upstairs, and wakes every morning precisely at four-thirty to start her day with a brisk walk and a text to her adult son, Tilly, who receives a number of these texts every daily, exhorting him to proper behaviors; he rarely responds. The voice of Vera’s chapters (in close third person) is resolute and cheerfully bossy; but we understand that she is very lonely. Despite its name, her teahouse is far from famous. She knows it will soon have to be shut down.

Then something terribly exciting happens: she comes downstairs one morning to find a dead body in the teahouse. Vera is thrilled! She calls the police, but they do not seem nearly as worked up about the possible murder as they should be, and they are not at all appreciative that she has helpfully outlined the body for them in Sharpie. “Vera knows they won’t do anything… but… nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands, and what does Vera have but time?” And so the nosy, overbearing, but somehow magnetic Vera is on the case. If there is a case – the dead man, Marshall Chen, is originally ruled an accidental death. But Vera won’t let this stop her.

Soon other characters (suspects!) surface: there is Julia, Marshall’s widow, worn into submissive passivity by his years of verbal abuse, and her sweet toddler daughter, Emma. There’s Oliver, Marshall’s twin (who gives everyone a start when he first shows up on scene), long estranged from his bully of a brother. And then there are Sana and Riki, both of whom pose as reporters but who are each hiding a secret connection to the dead (murdered?) man. In her usual domineering manner, Vera takes each of these younger people under her wing, even charming the somewhat troubled Emma into calling her Grandma. It helps that Vera never stops cooking up wild, wonderful feasts of traditional Chinese food anytime they gather. Even as she’s befriending them and improving their lives (with a little insistent advice, not to say pushing), Vera is investigating each of the foursome as murder suspects. But as they come together to form an unusual little family of their own, she is less and less pleased at the thought of turning one of them into the police (incompetents!), especially as it is increasingly obvious that the late Marshall was not a nice man at all.

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers trades rather heavily on stereotypes about Chinese mothers, to an extent that I think would be problematic if the author did not herself come from that culture. She pokes fun in a loving manner. Does her in-group status excuse using stereotypes as the punchline? I don’t consider myself qualified to make a firm call on this, especially as I am not in-group; I’m cautiously okay with this case, but mine is not perhaps the final judgment that matters most. I will say the book is intended in good fun and comes off as such. Jesse Sutanto has published an impressive number of adult, young adult, and middle grade novels, and the writing style of this one leans toward the cute rather than the literary. Some constructions feel quickly slapped off. It’s fine for an easy, entertaining read, and this one hits the mark.

Rating: 7 bowls of congee.

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